


the bitter victory

by Fleshwerks



Series: Tantalus in Phlegethon [6]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Angst, Blood Magic, Gore, Grief, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-11
Updated: 2017-08-25
Packaged: 2018-10-17 15:12:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10596618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fleshwerks/pseuds/Fleshwerks
Summary: On the streets, the immediate aftermath of the Archdemon’s death. Zevran grieves Warden Surana already as he chases the remaining darkspawn out of Denerim, until….It's short.





	1. Chapter 1

He could vomit at the sight of him. The Warden’s face was black and blue, once fair and fine-boned, now blue, black, split open and swollen. Who could lay a hand on such beauty? But there he stood, hunched over, leaning on his staff with the ochre robes become that grotesque red. The dying red.  
  
_I came down as soon as I could,_ Warden Leandaros began, limping closer, eyes wide and full of apology, but stopped in his tracks.  
  
Zevran stared at him, mouth slack, eyes unseeing as if he was still blinded by the flash in the sky that had marked the death of the Archdemon.

  
  
All thoughts ground to a halt, weight shifted from the boot on a dying hurlock’s neck as he tried to steady himself.  
  
_I didn’t do it!_ he heard the Warden say as if from far away, and is lover’s movements seemed jagged as he came closer, hand pressend on a grievous wound in his abdomen. An apparition, a ghost, someone that should’ve been dead. No living being could move like that. Shouldn’t move like that,  with tears in his eyes and his split lips shaping up for a cry that no demon of despair could match. He watched this dead man fall, and clasped his fingers around his arms to catch him, but they were too slick with blood, and something recoiled him as his fingers dug into open, frying cuts on Lea’s arms. All that blood spent for magic.  
  
_It was right there,_ Lea Surana wailed, crumpling onto his knees. _The archdemon was right there, and I couldn’t do it! I watched it, I watched Loghain draw his sword,_ Lea blubbered, tears carving paths in the crusting blood on his cheeks, snot on his upper lip. _I watched him draw it and plunge it in its head, and I let him! It should’ve been me, and it wasn’t!_  
  
Zevran stood over the Warden, dazed, coughing as the smell of wood smoke from the burning buildings filled the street, leaving the two of them in poison haze.  
  
_I thought you died,_ he managed flatly with tears in his eyes. He was too shocked to truly cry. He caught himself thinking a curious thought: where has my soul gone? Was it burned from me when Fort Drakon went up in this divine, terrible light? And though the wind shifted around them and the sparks from burning buildings changed direction, and though the smoke carried away to reveal a street littered with corpses, and clear the air, he still felt the bitterness in his eyes, and still he was choking, with only smallest, most shallow breaths to sustain him somehow.  
  
But Lea Surana wailed, filthy hair undone, draping and coiling on the cobblestones like black snakes, cursing himself and any gods that he could remember, voice growing weaker and weaker, and still it seemed that the wounds on his arms and his side concerned him the least.  
  
Zevran fell to his knees and grabbed the Grey Warden by his shoulders, and looked him in the face.  
  
_I thought you died,_ he repeated, and suddenly the Warden’s wails stopped, with a single sharp gasp. He watched as his bruised, beaten features morphed into a mask of horror as Lea Surana realised, in his selfish chase for glory and the grief and loss, what he’d bestowed on the one he’d claimed to love. It made the slipping of Urthemiel’s death from him feel like a pinprick compared to the blade that cut into his heart now.  
  
_I’m here,_ the Warden suddenly said, voice rife with both acknowledgement and wonder. _I came to find you._ Zevran jolted at the touch of the Warden’s ice cold, bloody hands on his cheeks, and he noticed, as if from far away, that the Warden’s lips had gone blue. _I came as fast as I could, I couldn’t…_ and for the first time Lea Surana seemed to notice the abyss at his heels. He cast one shocked look at Zevran’s dull, dazed face, and allowed his magic to flow of him, a miasma crawling around them, looking for life. But Zevran’s work was thorough, the street was littered with the dead and the dead only, with only the assassin himself as a beacon, shining and golden, and Lea could not muster the strength to flood the city with his magic in search of any life to leech from, be it a dying soldier or a near-dead darkspawn.  
  
_You told me to fight on the streets,_ Zevran suddenly said, with the fog lifted from his mind. The insistence, the sharpness of his voice knocked Lea Surana out from his search for scraps of life on the streets of Denerim.  
  
_You told me to fight on the streets so you wouldn’t have to see me die, and fail your mission._ He grabbed Lea Surana by the shoulders again, but this time he wanted it to hurt. He dug his fingernails into him, right through the fabric, and stared at him with rising rage.  
  
_You are selfish._ The simple sentence, the acid behind it burned the Warden harder than any curse word ever could. _You made me watch._ The assassin shook him violently.  
  
_You made me watch._ He loosened his grip, but as he did, the Warden awkwardly fell backwards, unable to keep himself upright any longer. What parts of his skin wasn’t swollen, discoloured or painted red, were as pale as death. But Zevran lifted his near-limp body and brought it into his arms.  
  
_I won’t watch the second time. I pledged you my life. Use it._  
  
What? Lea asked weakly, blood running down the lone furrow between his brows.  
  
  
_I will not lose another,_ Zevran muttered, imploring Lea Surana to use his magic. There were two, once. Rinnala, Taliesen, he’d watched them both die. He’d watched countless lovers, however brief and shallow, die. A scene so ugly he never wanted to see it again, and yet here it was, again, all too familiar.  
  
He cradled him, feeling the tendrils of his magic prying at his life force, and shivered. For battle, for death, for hope, and despair, and a smile tugged at his lips, because Lea Surana had made his choice. Shivered for the fury and the crash that followed. Trembling like a leaf, embracing his lover, life leaving him just so that the Warden would have a fighting chance. Warmth returned to the skin of his lover, or was it his fingers growing colder? He buried his face in Lea Surana’s shoulder as his strength failed him, even though he still clutched the fabric on Lea’s back.  
  
_You’re still here,_ he whispered weakly.  
  
_We’re alive,_ the Grey Warden murmured, and withdrew his magic, and he could feel his arms around him, embracing him with renewed strength. He felt himself collapse into his lap, and open his eye just enough to see Warden Lea Surana  over him, looking down at him, and he remembered the childhood tales of the spirits of rivers and lakes and ponds that would lure unwitting young men to death with their dark allure. Strength in his posture, mended by his preying magic. But this spirit had one good eye, and it looked at him with heart-shattering love. A pale blue shining star to follow out of the great churn of time, space.  
  
So they waited, embers in a sea of ash, for others to come, for those white sails to come and save them, billowed by that same wind that had first blown away the smoke and revealed his lover before it was too late.

 

 


	2. lepers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lea Surana experiences suspicion by healers in the aftermath of the victory in Denerim. He looks for Zevran who is being kept away from him.

Lea Surana had been up a mere two days after he and Zevran had been found huddled up in the middle of the ashes of Denerim. Aches left his body one by one as new life poured into him, stolen from others by magic. But when he’d inquired about Zevran, all he ever got from the tired, tight-lipped healers was a strange glance, and with each passing day the knot in his stomach grew tighter.  
  
He’d asked Wynne who was coordinating the healers in the field hospital set up within the walls of the surprisingly intact Guerrin estate, but all Wynne said was _you shouldn’t go. Lie down and rest.  
  
_ That’s when cold sweat covered him. I shouldn’t go? Why? And he wrapped his arms tightly around his chest as scenarios one worse than the other conjured in his head before they surrendered under their dreamer’s iron will and slithered back to where they came from.  
  
He heard the healers talk about the elf in one of the more secluded rooms of the estate. Quarantine of some sort, the healer girls said when Lea pressed them for information. Neither looked him in the eye - walls, floor, their own shoes, but not his eyes. Lea could smell it on them, the desire to be anywhere but here, cornered in the dead end of a hallway like prey.   
  
_I’ll take you to him,_ the younger girl of the pair finally budged, rolling her shoulders and peering from under her mousy hair. She looked like she hadn’t slept for days. Everybody looked that way, faces as grey as the ash that was still falling from the fires burning in the Alienage and in the poor parts of the city where houses were made of wood instead of stone, sitting snugly next to each other, wall to wall.  
  
_I’ll come to you when my shift ends.  
  
And when is that? _ Lea Surana asked and took a step back. The healers both seemed to breathe more easily.  
  
_After sundown,_ she said. _We need to go, ser Grey Warden. Many need our help._ Lea Surana stepped aside, watching the girls, one carrying bandages that seemed to be made out of torn cloth, the other picking up two heavy buckets of water, one in each hand. The water splashed over the edge as the mousy girl struggled along.

 

\------------------

 

He was lying in his bed. They’d given him back his room in the Arl’s estate, but he’d declined it, so they filled the warm room with the wounded, and he was content to grab a lesser bunk. There was a shard of metal in his hands, one of the ones he’d used to make protective talismans to everyone who was expected to fight in his vicinity. Now he filled the runed, crafted little vessel with his own magic. It came to know the smell of his spells, the taste, the feel, and the rune carved on it by Sandal spelled a denial. Whoever carried it was safe from his leeching magic, until the trinket’s power waned. This one won’t last more than a day. A day will be enough.  
  
The mousy girl appeared beside him like a ghost, eyes sunken so that she resembled less a human and more a ghoul. Lea pushed off the bed, put the trinket in a pouch tied to his belt, and nodded at the girl.   
  
_Time to go?_ He asked, but the girl didn’t answer. She just turned to leave, and Lea Surana followed, the hem of his robes whispering on the cold stone floor. Somewhere from the distance, a cacophony of pained moans flowed and ebbed. He’d grown used to the constant chorus of the ailing and the dying, though it had been steadily growing quieter as some died and some healed.  
  


The healer took him outside to the well where buckets of water were waiting and heaved one off the edge as the men around the well filled more.   
  
_Allow me,_ Leandaros said when the weight of a water bucket made the tendons in the girl’s bruised forearms tighten so that it seemed as if they could tear open any moment. She let him to take the bucket, and he caught her flexing her fingers, blisters in her palms.  
  
They descended two floors underground into the vast cellars of the estate where nothing lit the corridors save for a row of oil lamps, some gone out, the remaining casting flickering shadows on the walls of wine cellars where Lea spotted blood-covered, dead-eyed healers, some curled up on their mattresses, exhausted, others huddling around another oil lamp, sharing amongst themselves the bottles of the Arl’s expensive wine that they’d scavenged.

 

_The Arl can march down here with an army if he so likes,_ Lea heard one man whose face he didn’t see, rasp. But he can pry this booze from my cold dead hands.  
  
A bitter laugh rang out from his companions. They knew no one would lay a finger on them so every night they emptied more of the Arl’s wine cellars. ‘Payment’, they called their righteous looting. Lea didn’t fault them for it.  
  
_We’re here,_ the tired healer girl said when they arrived at the last door to the left of the hallway. Next to it was a bench with a brass washing basin and fresh bandages, linens.   
  
_He’s there?_ Lea said, nodding at the door. _Why are you keeping him in a cellar?_  
  
_So we can get to him fast,_ the girl replied curtly. _You should not go in there.  
  
_ This again.  
  
_Quarantine?_ He said, _well it’s not going to hurt me._ He lifted the bucket to pour the water into the basin. Must’ve been washing time.  
  
_Oh, we’re not worried about you._ There was sudden ice in the girl’s voice, but before he could question him the healer gave him a suspicious glance, then looked at the water and the bandages, then at Lea Surana again, and she sighed and shook her head. She turned and left without saying another word. __  
  
  


_\-------------_

_  
_ He draped the bandages and linens over arm, grabbed the washing basin, and edged the heavy door open with his shoulder.  
  
_Hello?_ He murmured before entering the dimly lit room. No one answered, so he pushed forward. On the far side of the room there were wine kegs stacked haphazardly on top of each other. The low-burning fireplace barely illuminated a bed made of boxes, and within the linens lied Lea’s lover, unmoving.   
  
Lea walked to him and set the bowl down on the floor, then stood a moment on the bedside, seeing for the first time what he had done ever since they were found and then separated from each other.   
  
He touched Zevran’s naked shoulder and shuddered at the feel of it. A dying man’s skin, slack and sallow. Stark shadows turned a face once beautiful into a death mask. Ugly bruises that should’ve been healing painted his body in splotches of angry blue and purple. Cuts small and insignificant festered, rejecting the cotton threads they were sewn together with, and his raw knuckles that should have been scabbed over had turned into open, weeping sores. And each breath he took was shallow and laborious, as if the very act of it drove spikes between his battered ribs.  
  
_Oh…_ Lea sniffled, and for a moment he lost his composure, tears welling up, mouth drawn, teeth bared as if it was him unhealing and at death’s door, but then he straightened, wiped the tears into his gold and ocher silk sleeve, and settled down on the edge of the sickbed, grabbing the washcloth, soaking it up in the water and herb mixture. To work.  
  
He took Zevran’s arm and gently washed over the bruises and cuts to not awaken him.  
  
_I’ve taken something from you,_ Lea whispered. _I’ve come to give it back._  
  
And Zevran’s eyes opened, glinting ghostly in the low light like will-o’-wisps. Lights from some dreaded other side, and Lea stopped, staring back at him through pregnant silence, feeling the feverish fingers of his lover dig into his own forearm.  
  
Lea set the washcloth down and reached into the pouch on his belt.   
_  
Here,_ he said softly as he showed Zevran the runed talisman. Zevran’s grip on his arm loosened as he recognised the trinket. Lea put it in his other hand and watched the fingers curl into a tight fist around it.  
  
For a while, Lea continued to wash Zevran, gently over the rotting stitches, in silence.  
  
Suddenly, Zevran spoke.  
  
_I have been counting days by,_ he paused as he struggled to breathe in. His voice was low, drawn, ... _the people who come into this windowless room._  
  
_Where have you been?_  
  
It sounded like an accusation.   
  
_They wouldn’t let me in,_ Lea said dejectedly, and moved on to wash Zevran’s chest. _Wynne and other healers wouldn’t let me know where you were. Said I shouldn’t come here. I had to corner one of your healers to get her to tell me where you are.  
  
_ He could swear Zevran attempted a smile. Maybe he just hoped he did.  
  
_The healers think,_ another pause, another pained breath, _they think you put a curse on me. I hear them talking down the hallway, and their whispers when they’re here… when they think I’m not awake.  
  
Look at me, _ he said.  
  
_I am,_ Lea replied, and he did. He didn’t want to see it but he had to. Zevran had given him his own life force to leech off of when he was dying, and he’d drunk greedily from him, too much, too carelessly.   
  
_They’ve brought in mages, but all they can do is to keep me alive. Day at a time. I cannot heal,_ Zevran said.  
_  
_ Lea smiled. Even now there was some sick pleasure in finding that other mages were helpless in the face of his own magic, unknowing of what to do.  
  
_I said I was going to give you back what I took from you,_ Lea said. _I am a poor healer, I’ll have to stay around all night. I’ll undo this._ He meant it. There was no room for what-ifs and self-doubt. A failure wasn’t an option available to be considered.  
  
_I hate it here._ Lea cocked his eyebrows but didn’t look up from the ribs he was carefully trying to wash without aggravating the fractures, the bruises. He couldn’t recall the last time when Zevran spoke in superlatives. Hate was a dusty, unused word in his vocabulary. _I hate being stuck somewhere with no light, no way out.  
I grew up in rooms like this, _ Lea said and rinsed the washcloth. _No windows where we slept, just thick walls and water outside._ But he’d come to understand what it was like for someone who was used to living in the sun, whose work, whose life depended on exits.  
  
It was time, Lea thought. What little arcane connection to the Fade he had, he reached for it, his mind’s fingers barely brushing the Veil, then scraping at it while he continued to wash Zevran, help him sit up so he could reach his back, then changing his bloodied bandages. Drop by drop the Fade bled into him, mixed with the magic of life and death, and then poured into Zevran. It was different from the mages. The magic still carried his essence, and the vampiric magic that still lingered in Zevran recognised it.   
  
_I can smell it,_ Zevran said. Magic always carried a scent. _It’s different._  
  
_It’s the Fade,_ Lea said and settled more comfortably at the foot of the bed.   
  
_How long have you been on your feet?_ Zevran asked.   
  
_Days.  
  
How many died as you leeched life out of them? _  
  
Lea frowned. _I cannot help the aura and you know it.  
  
Is that what you need to tell yourself to sleep at night? _ Zevran chuckled darkly, then groaned. Laughing hurt.  
  
_Zevran, you told me I could tap into you. You all but ordered me to. What’s this about now?_ Lea asked more loudly, speaking faster.   
  
_I suppose I did,_ Zevran said. _And now I know how terrible it can be for the one caught in your spell.  
  
Listen, _ Lea said, crossed his legs under him and leaned forward. _If I take a single berry from someone’s bowl and it’s all that takes for him to starve to death, then, my love, that man was dead already._ Lea pushed off the bed and hopped on the floor. _But I don’t have to be._  
  
Lea sighed and paced around, cooling his temper. Cannot fault Zevran for his words, he’d lived through all that Lea Surana was trying to justify.  
  
He sighed again and sat down at the edge of the bed, looking down at Zevran’s face. To his surprise, Zevran lifted his arm and rested it on Lea’s thigh, and closed his eyes.

 

_How are you?_ Zevran asked after a brief silence. It seemed like the words came a little easier, though more likely, Lea realised, that he was just hearing and seeing what he wished.  
  
_Oh,_ Lea said, idly stroking Zevran’s hand, staring at the dying fire in the hearth.  
  
_A little bitter,_ he said and a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. _I mean, after all that I had to do, I’d hoped.. I mean, it is not unreasonable to get a little payoff. Some recognition. From people… or myself, really, is it?_ He turned his gaze back to Zevran, finding him looking back, eyes like stars.  
  
_In any case,_ Lea continued when Zevran didn’t answer, _at least Warden Loghain doesn’t seem to be terribly happy about it all either. You should hear what they call him now. The ‘redeemer’. The ‘atoner’. It’s fun to watch him freeze and squirm every time someone addresses him as a hero. He keeps mostly to himself now.  
  
Do you mind if I..? _ Lea asked Zevran suddenly, tapping at the bedside. Zevran tried to scoot, but pain still held him in shackles. A little bit of struggling by them both, and Lea could finally lay down next to him. Not for sleeping, there would be no sleep for him tonight as he had to channel the weak healing spell, consciously keep the stream of magic fed. But he’d missed him, his body, his breathing, and some sort of peace fell upon him as he curled up next to his lover carefully so as to nudge his broken body, and propped himself up on his elbow. They stayed like that for a while, reunited, enduring the terror, pain and venom that had come between them.  
  
\-----  
  
The hearth light had gone out, but a single torch was still burning in its sconce by the door.  
  
Lea Surana thought Zevran had fallen asleep at last, after days of non-sleep, lingering by the edge of the cold beyond, not quite there, and not here either. His body jerked, startled, when he hear Zevran’s voice again.  
  
_What happens now? Now that the Archdemon lies dead._  
  
He hadn’t had the chance to really think about it. Not with worry and scuttling about as more and more people learned of Warden Surana’s recovery and insisted on reports of Fort Drakon and with many looking at him, queen Anora and Arl Eamon for how to proceed next, when the storm had passed and the survivors were left stunned, wandering aimlessly until someone gave them direction again.  
  
_I.._ he rolled onto his back and stared at the dark ceiling. _I don’t know._

 

_I’m a Grey Warden. Ferelden doesn’t have an enclave. I guess they’ll send me wherever the Wardens are. Orlais, maybe?  
  
_ He found himself taken aback by the uncertain future. He’d never thought this far. He, among others, had suddenly been stripped of his purpose. Another worm gnawed at the walls of his belly, the fear that he was set loose to save the world but now that it is done, irons will once again be clapped on him. If not by the Grey Wardens themselves, then the Circle, or his new King and Queen, and should he evade them by some miracle, the dream song that haunts every warden’s dreams would eventually come to reclaim what it gave him.  
  
_Or I could defect. Disappear. Find us a home someplace sunny and green. Rest a little._  
  
_You’d go crazy within an hour,_ Zevran said. _You don’t know the meaning of the word rest, and you’ll never be happy away from the thick of things.  
  
_ Lea laughed. _I suppose not. Maybe I’ll go back to the Circle for a while. See what’s left of it. Help with rebuilding. Cite ‘acquisition of valuable knowledge for the benefit of the Grey Wardens’._  
  
It’s strange. I’d always imagine I’d be going back to the Circle once it is done. Even with the bindings of the Wardens. Hard to feel a part of an order when it’s just you, some idiot, two dozen dead and looming legends against the very thing it takes armies of those legends to fight.

_  
_ Silence.  
  
_I hope I factor into your future,_ Zevran said quietly.  
  
Lea looked at him, then pressed his lips against his clammy, hot forehead. The infections in Zevran’s body made his skin burn with fever.   
  
_Do you want to?_ After all this. After what you’ve seen, and after what I did, and knowing that I belong to slumbering gods and can never be truly yours? The thought threatened to bring tears to his eyes again, but he closed his eyes before any could wet his cheeks.  
  
I want to. _I choose to._

 

Choose. What a beautiful word. For him, and for Zevran, who knew the true weight of it. Lea nuzzled the crook between Zevran’s neck and shoulder, and smiled. Somewhere down the hallway people roared with laughter, voices drunk off the Arl’s wines, the weight of days and thoughts temporarily lifted from their hearts. Lea rolled on his back again, fumbled around his belt and brought his wineskin to his lips. He was almost out, but it didn’t matter. He just needed it for tonight, to stay awake, to flood these halls with the healing mist.  
  
\-----------  
  
Lea jerked awake at the sound of wood being tossed into the fireplace.   
  


Fuck, he thought. Fell asleep. He squinted at the bright fresh torches at the door and the fire leaping in the hearth. Worried that he hadn’t done enough before he passed out, he turned his gaze at Zevran and found him asleep. His chest rose and fell in even, slow, deep breaths. His skin felt warm, no longer burning, and golden hues had replaced the ash in his skin.  
  
He turned around and saw the two healer girls from last night peering through the doorway, suspicious, disapproving eyes nailed on him, but neither seemed to dare to take a step through the door. Wynne was tending to the fire, weaving flames with her fingertips, face bearing signs of another sleepless night, back hunched, face stern.  
  
Once the flames crackled steady, she turned to Lea who was sitting on the edge of Zevran’s bed, legs dangling off the edge, inspecting his lover.  
  
_I told you that you shouldn’t have come here,_ Wynne said. _He is weak. We can’t risk any illnesses, or your magic here until he’s improving, do you understand?_ She was terse but not hostile. The speech of someone who’s exhausted with no energy to spare to niceties.  
  
Lea Surana looked at Wynne, then the girls, smiled broadly and slid off the bed.  
  
_Look!_ he said in an excited half-whisper, eyes gleaming as he took Zevran’s hand and showed it to Wynne. He turned it so Wynne could see Zevran’s knuckles. No longer bleeding and weeping but scabbed over. The bruises  on his forearms had hints of yellow-green around the edges.  
  
_Here,_ Lea said. _Feel him,_ he said, and touched Zevran’s forehead with the back of his hand. So did Wynne, and pulled back her hand, expression unreadable.  
  
_I think those stitches need to be reopened and cleaned,_ Lea said, _but I think….  
  
_ Didn’t matter what he thought. Sleepily he laid Zevran’s hand on his chest and pulled on his boots that stood neatly in front of the bed, hair falling all around his face a mess as he ducked to put them on.  
  
_He’s got the amulet,_ Lea said. _Don’t worry._ Wynne acknowledged it with a nod, but was already checking Zevran’s other injuries, still concerned.  
  
_He’s not awake,_ Wynne finally said.

 

_He’s sleeping. Out cold,_ Lea answered chipperly, and turned to leave. The girls at the doorway hastily entered the room, still circling Lea as if he was a leper.

 

_One last thing,_ Lea said, leaning on the door frame. Wynne’s gaze rose to meet his.

 

_I think he can be moved. Somewhere with windows. Please._

 

I’ll see you soon. Somewhere sunnier. I love you, he thought as he left with a lighter heart, looking at the empty cellar rooms that the healers had abandoned for the day, to bring back others from the edge of the abyss.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rushed as per always. I have no patience.

**Author's Note:**

> I was completely slammed when I wrote this so it's incredibly pretentious and purple. It brought me both great enjoyment and great shame!


End file.
